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Steve Jobs, Freedom Fighter’s Friend

October 6, 2011

My own first association with Apple came in the early eighties, when I was working for a director at a production company as a documentary factotum—researching, writing, producing. That’s where I first laid hands on a personal computer, and it was an Apple office, so, long before Final Cut Pro, I have associated the world of Steve Jobs with the world of movies. But it’s a bitter irony that reinforced that association once again, yesterday, at an altogether world-historical level.

Yesterday morning the Film Society of Lincoln Center held a press screening of “This Is Not a Film,” the Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s remarkable response to the fact of his house arrest while awaiting appeal of his six-year prison sentence and twenty-year ban on making films, travelling abroad, and giving interviews. This is the Iranian government’s punitive response to his activities on behalf of the Green Movement. This film was made in his apartment, and features him, by himself (he avoids any activities that could come under the rubric of directing) and in the company of another filmmaker, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, talking about his case, acting out and reading aloud the script of a film he was banned from making, and just living his life in captivity in anticipation of a return to jail. There will be more to say about the film overall, later (its public screening at the Festival is October 13th). For now, it’s worth mentioning one sequence—the most extraordinary sequence in this extraordinary film—which takes place after Mirtahmasb has gone home. Panahi then answers the door, and finds the interim janitor there to take out the trash; they ride the elevator together (still within the confines of Panahi’s legal limits) as their discussion veers audaciously to reminiscences of the filmmaker’s arrest—and Panahi, who is not allowed to use a camera, instead records this powerful, anguished, yet light-heartedly self-deprecating conversation, punctuated with stops at every floor for trash collecting and apartment-building gossip, with his iPhone.

There’s no better example of the profound implications of casual talk about the democratization of filmmaking through ready access to video. I have no idea what took place behind the scenes when the device was conceived, or what Steve Jobs may specifically have intended when he saw to its multimedia capacities; in any case, the touchstone of invention—whether technical or artistic—is the power to go beyond intentions to take on a life of its own.